Weekly Design News Roundup – 5 July 2013

The week is coming to an end and that means it is time for us to look back on the week that passed, the best design news, resources and other goodies. This week we look at great UI design, hand drawn fonts awesome movie posters and much more.

Generating transparency in the background has become one of the hottest web design trend of 2013, at least according to HongKiat.com. In the past, transparent background can only be generated through the use of Photoshop, which becomes quite cumbersome since you cannot see the changes immediately on your web design. Nowadays, due to CSS3, you can easily create transparency in your background by manipulating some codes. Best of all, some designers even created premium transparent wordpress themes so that everything works run out of the box without any coding at all.

Joomla is a premium content management system that has gained popularity owing to the responsive designs, user friendly interface, optimized features and many other factors. These open source web developing platform is opted by designers as it supports a large range of plugins and it is more dynamic in its functions in comparison to the other open source content management systems.

Great user interface, or UI design is all about helping the user to accomplish a given task as simply and efficiently as possible. While the look and feel is undeniably important, at the core of a great UI is function: in terms of navigation, it should be intuitive to the point of being invisible. As soon as a user gets lost, or can’t work out where to go, the UI has failed.

HTML website templates have become quite popular these days and for good reasons. Even if you are capable of developing your own templates, the templates in this post can be quite useful for you. Plenty of web developers do not have the time to design their own web designs and a lot of designers won’t find time or skills to code Photoshop files. Below, you will find more than 25 HTML website templates that are some of the finest on the web. By browsing on this post, we hope that you can find the perfect HTML templates for you coming projects or get the inspiration you need for your own designs.

Nowadays, knowledge isn’t something so hard to get and difficult to possess as in the past, when there was no Internet and you had to go to the library and hope that the book you’re searching for isn’t taken, or you had to study hard and also pay good money for this effort. Nowadays you can find almost everything about anything on the web and, in a few days, you can master the weirdest or most difficult skills. Maybe for somebody, designing or web developing is something that was always on their ‘to study’ list, but something was standing in their way. Maybe the wish and enthusiasm to learn designing or developing is still there? If so, here are 30 of the best free eBooks that every future or actual designer and developer should read.

Sketch is a great vector graphics app for OSX by Bohemian Coding, which lets us rediscover the pleasure of designing web and mobile applications. We have been using Adobe Fireworks for the last 2 years. It has some unique features and workflows which make it more appropriate for UI design than Photoshop.

Unlike the serif font family, these hand drawn fonts looked less serious but they tend to give and convey strong human touch wherever they are applied. Hand-drawn fonts are hard to stand on it’s own, but they are utmost perfect for these following situations: Hand drawn websites If you are inspired to give your new web design a sketchy or hand-drawn look and feel, these fonts are without a doubt the perfect math to the layout.

All over the world, there is the preconceived notion that the job of a designer is simple – he just has to create some web pages, group them into a website, add it online and voila, the work is finished. Under these circumstances, even the payment for this kind of service could be neglected, this being a job more suitable for children, not anything of importance. This list contains 15 web design blogs, some of the best existent, and a web designer must check these frequently, usually each one posts a new interesting article daily. Definitely, the list isn’t fixed, anyone may add or cut the number, depending on the own preferences of the subject. In the unwanted case that I missed a very important blog or simply you want to promote your preferences, please share with us what you think by using the comment form.

In 2011, the movie industry made a whopping $87 billion worldwide. With that much cash up for grabs, film studios and corner-office execs are all clamoring for their piece of the pie; and that means branding and marketing a given release is anything but child’s play. It’s interesting, then, that one approach to attracting film-goers has stood the test of time: the typographic movie poster.